3,898 research outputs found
The Chagos Islands cases: the empire strikes back
Good governance requires the accommodation of multiple interests in the cause of decision making. However, undue regard for particular sectional interests can take their toll upon public faith in government administration. Historically, broad conceptions of the good of the commonwealth were employed to outweigh the interests of groups that resisted colonisation. In the decision making of the British Empire, the standard approach for justifying the marginalisation of the interests of colonised groups was that they were uncivilised and that particular hardships were the price to be paid for bringing to them the imperial dividend of industrial society. It is widely assumed that with the dismantling of the British Empire, such impulses and their accompanying jurisprudence became a thing of the past. Even as decolonisation proceeded apace after the Second World War, however, the United Kingdom maintained control of strategically important islands with a view towards sustaining its global role. In an infamous example from this twilight period of empire, in the 1960s imperial interests were used to justify the expulsion of the Chagos islanders from the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Into the twenty-first century, this forced elision of the UKâs interests with the imperial âcommon goodâ continues to take centre stage in courtroom battles over the islandersâ rights, being cited before domestic and international tribunals in order to maintain the Chagossiansâ exclusion from their homeland. This article considers the new jurisprudence of imperialism which has emerged in a string of decisions which have continued to marginalise the Chagossiansâ interests
Microscopic Black Hole Pairs in Highly-Excited States
We consider the quantum mechanics of a system consisting of two identical,
Planck-size Schwarzschild black holes revolving around their common center of
mass. We find that even in a very highly-excited state such a system has very
sharp, discrete energy eigenstates, and the system performs very rapid
transitions from a one stationary state to another. For instance, when the
system is in the 100th excited state, the life times of the energy eigenstates
are of the order of s, and the energies of gravitons released in
transitions between nearby states are of the order of eV.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, uses RevTe
Thiemann transform for gravity with matter fields
The generalised Wick transform discovered by Thiemann provides a
well-established relation between the Euclidean and Lorentzian theories of
general relativity. We extend this Thiemann transform to the Ashtekar
formulation for gravity coupled with spin-1/2 fermions, a non-Abelian
Yang-Mills field, and a scalar field. It is proved that, on functions of the
gravitational and matter phase space variables, the Thiemann transform is
equivalent to the composition of an inverse Wick rotation and a constant
complex scale transformation of all fields. This result holds as well for
functions that depend on the shift vector, the lapse function, and the Lagrange
multipliers of the Yang-Mills and gravitational Gauss constraints, provided
that the Wick rotation is implemented by means of an analytic continuation of
the lapse. In this way, the Thiemann transform is furnished with a geometric
interpretation. Finally, we confirm the expectation that the generator of the
Thiemann transform can be determined just from the spin of the fields and give
a simple explanation for this fact.Comment: LaTeX 2.09, 14 pages, no figure
A Study of Activated Processes in Soft Sphere Glass
On the basis of long simulations of a binary mixture of soft spheres just
below the glass transition, we make an exploratory study of the activated
processes that contribute to the dynamics. We concentrate on statistical
measures of the size of the activated processes.Comment: 17 pages, 9 postscript figures with epsf, uses harvmac.te
Siderophile element fractionation in meteor crater impact glasses and metallic spherules
Meteor Crater, Arizona provides an opportunity to study, in detail, elemental fractionation processes occurring during impacts through the study of target rocks, meteorite projectile and several types of impact products. We have performed EMPA and INAA on target rocks, two types of impact glass and metallic spherules from Meteor Crater. Using literature data for the well studied Canyon Diablo iron we can show that different siderophite element fractionations affected the impact glasses than affected the metallic spherules. The impact glasses primarily lost Au, while the metallic spherules lost Fe relative to other siderophile elements
Octet baryon electromagnetic form factors in nuclear medium
We study the octet baryon electromagnetic form factors in nuclear matter
using the covariant spectator quark model extended to the nuclear matter
regime. The parameters of the model in vacuum are fixed by the study of the
octet baryon electromagnetic form factors. In nuclear matter the changes in
hadron properties are calculated by including the relevant hadron masses and
the modification of the pion-baryon coupling constants calculated in the
quark-meson coupling model. In nuclear matter the magnetic form factors of the
octet baryons are enhanced in the low region, while the electric form
factors show a more rapid variation with . The results are compared with
the modification of the bound proton electromagnetic form factors observed at
Jefferson Lab. In addition, the corresponding changes for the bound neutron are
predicted.Comment: Version accepted for publication in J.Phys. G. Few changes. 40 pages,
14 figures and 8 table
Critical Exponents of the Three Dimensional Random Field Ising Model
The phase transition of the three--dimensional random field Ising model with
a discrete () field distribution is investigated by extensive Monte
Carlo simulations. Values of the critical exponents for the correlation length,
specific heat, susceptibility, disconnected susceptibility and magnetization
are determined simultaneously via finite size scaling. While the exponents for
the magnetization and disconnected susceptibility are consistent with a first
order transition, the specific heat appears to saturate indicating no latent
heat. Sample to sample fluctuations of the susceptibilty are consistent with
the droplet picture for the transition.Comment: Revtex, 10 pages + 4 figures included as Latex files and 1 in
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